


The Feeling of Blood

by StolenVampires



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blackwatch, Blood, Post Blackwatch, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, implied gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 12:37:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7439677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StolenVampires/pseuds/StolenVampires
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memories of the past don't fade, they just get locked away. For others, they break free, and ravage you until you can swallow them up again, then go back to pretending that your memories never were.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Feeling of Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Dark fic, I took inspiration from an account of what some war combatants face after leaving the field then returning to it. Jesse McCree PoV, mentions of Gabriel.

He tries to forget the feeling of blood.

It’s wet and sticky.   
It cools too quickly in the air but for a while, it’s warm and so near your own body temperature, you don’t notice it until it’s soaked your clothes and begun to run down coating you in a dark red that will dry to a rusty copper brown.   
It tastes like metal and makes you want to drink to wash away the flavor.  
Yet its human. Distinct and known. Its not something you fear swallowing as it runs down your chin or face and gathers on your finger tips.  
Organic. Natural. 

He tries to forget that it coats him head to toe as he walks back to the camp, knowing that he looks simpley wet from a rain that never was there in the heart of the Mojave Desert. He knows the black cloth and kevlar stick to him and make disgusting sounds of tacky not yet fully dry glue composed of his fellow man’s vital fluids.

The eyes look at him, and they understand. They know the feeling as well he does. The way it creeps into crevices. Under your nails, between your toes. It clumps in your hair making it appear you don’t bathe or that you might be like a matted dog, fur unkept and left to gather and fester with dead cells. The eyes look at his feet, watching as the small drips begin to lessen, knowing that it dries quickly to his skin, coating him, changing the color from white to copper red. Then to brown.  
Then finally to black.

In the night it’s harder to see the sheen it leaves behind begin to fade, but as he walks by the campfire, they can seen the last places where it’s still thick.  
Where it’s still wet.  
They can see where it's dry and it flakes off, replacing the drops with something thicker. They can see that it’s not from him, just on him.

They know how it feels, yet none of them move to touch him. None of them say a word. It is part of them, this right of passage they take each time it happens. A bond they have. A pact they share. They don’t speak of it. They don’t ask.  
They don’t tell.  
They never say because speaking of it makes it real, and none of them want to admit it’s real.

They aren’t supposed to be real.  
They aren’t supposed to exist.  
They shouldn’t have to do this but they have to.  
They have to do what no one else will.  
They do this, because if they don’t, someone else will be forced to.  
They do this, because the real heros can’t. 

He tries to forget the feeling of blood as he wakes up, years later, sweat running down the back of his neck and blankets kicked off his bed as his body runs too hot for the 68 degree room.  
He tries to forget.

Yet the weight of his gun is the same.  
The bed is the one he slept in all those years ago.  
Only difference is then, a man would walk with him to the showers and tell him, ‘Lo siento.’  
The man would stand outside, waiting, towel and clean clothes in hand. A smoke ready along with a warm meal. There would be no jokes. No words. Just blessed silence. The next day, things would be different, but until he slept, the man would just watch over him.  
Knowing that it was a painful agony they shared, one that they couldn’t tell others, because they already saw themselves as monsters.  
They didn’t need others to see them and think that too.

Now?  
Now they talk.  
Now they ask.  
They complain about it.  
They deny it and justify it and cover it with false justifications and act like they understand what it feels like. 

He tries to forget the feeling of blood as he lets the warm water run down his body, clean and pure until all that's left is cold and someone down the hall is yelling about it. He can’t speak about what he knows. He can’t ever say what he has seen and done.

He just tries to forget.  
Forget that every so often, in the heat of battle he’d taste the copper red, feel it hit his skin and body, burning hotter than any fire that has ever touched him and hurt him.  
And he’d smile.

He will never be able to forget the feeling of blood.


End file.
